Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Cab Thoughts 4/23/14

"There is unprecedented, I believe, influence on the media, not just the news, but the images you see everywhere, by well-orchestrated and financed campaign of special interests, political interests and corporations."--investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson


In past outbreaks, the Ebola death rate has been as high as 90 percent. In Guinea so far, about 60 percent of the 157 suspected cases have died. No one is sure why the survival rate is so much better but this area has been more accessible than other sites so prompt medical response, particularly volume maintenance, might be a factor. One creepy side note: The virus, after the victim survives, persists for months in semen and mother's milk so the victim might become a reservoir after his cure.
 
A charge of attempted murder against a nine-month-old baby was dropped during a court hearing in Pakistan.
 
Anthony Podesta made $13 million in lobbying income last year from clients like Lockheed Martin, Wells Fargo, U.S. Airways, Wal-Mart and the National Biodiesel  Board. His wife Heather's lobbying firm made $4 million from health companies, the American Beverage Association, and Brookfield Power. Podesta's brother, John Podesta, currently holds the high-ranking position of counselor to the president, and was White House chief of staff during Bill Clinton's second term.
 
Who is....Pamela Lyndon Travers?
 
The world's largest salt flats, the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, is also the world's biggest single deposit of lithium, accounting for perhaps a third of the world's resources of this alkaline metal. Third after the gases hydrogen and helium on the periodic table, lithium contains just three protons each, making the lightest of all metals. And like its near kin, sodium and potassium, it will react spontaneously to water. It is tremendously energy dense, thus a terrific element for a battery.
 
Corporate tax rates in the U.S. are the highest among the developed nations. The average rate in America in 2013 was 39.13%; for all of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations is 28.2%. Senate Finance Committee chief Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, reported U.S. corporations now hold $2.1 trillion in earnings in overseas accounts, close to 12% of the U.S. gross domestic product. Returning that money would be quite a transfusion of money into the economy. Real money not newly created Fed debt. But there is a feeling against doing that, a belief that those companies should, somehow, pay.
 
In the dreaded gender income gap, the biggest disparity in incomes is between fathers and mothers. Is that a surprise? Is that the result of some subtle bigotry? In medicine, young male doctors earned much higher incomes than young female doctors. But young male doctors worked over 500 hours more per year than young female doctors. So.....should we mandate that the women make the same amount even if they work less? Or..should we make the men work less?
But this is the way one must think when all people are seen, not as equals, but as the same.
 
A routine inventory check at Paris' Pasteur Institute revealed that 2,349 tubes containing fragments of the virus responsible for the deaths of 774 people in 2002 were missing.
 
There is a movie out, made in India, called "The Lunchbox," about lunchbox delivery men in Mumbai called dabbawallahs who run arguably India's most efficient and trusted business. Every working day, for more than 125 years, they have transported hundreds of thousands of midday lunches back and forth from home kitchens and restaurants to office workers in the world's fourth most densely populated city. Harvard Business School commissioned a six-month study into the service in 2010 that showed only one in a million deliveries go awry. 
 
Golden oldie:
 
Karlan and Wood used variable solicitation techniques at Freedom from Hunger in a test of its direct marketing. This is from their abstract. First, larger gift amounts, holding education and income constant, is a proxy for altruism giving (as it is associated with giving more to fewer charities) versus warm glow giving (giving less to more charities). Second, those motivated by altruism will respond positively to appeals based on evidence, whereas those motivated by warm glow may respond negatively to appeals based on evidence as it turns off the emotional trigger for giving, or highlights uncertainty in aid effectiveness. 

Andreas Georgiou was assigned by the EU and the IMF to become the head of Elstat, Greece's new official statistical agency, to try to make sense out of the Greek economic statistics. He soon was accused of betraying the national interest, a crime that in theory carries a potential life sentence. 'I am being prosecuted for not cooking the books.' he said.
 
Ginny Weasley, the freckly redhead who later marries Harry Potter, grows up to be a sports journalist for the Daily Phophet, according to new writing from J.K. Rowling on the website Pottermore.
 
Ms. Sebelius is considering running against Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas. This is proof positive that politics is an isolated sport with no connection to ability, prior performance or reality. That the architect of the ACA could be seriously considered as a possibility for the Senate must mean something really bad.
 
CUNY intends to pay Paul Krugman $225,000, or $25,000 per month (over two semesters), to “play a modest role in our public events” and “contribute to the build-up” of a new “inequality initiative.” It is not clear, and neither CUNY nor Krugman was able to explain, what “contribute to the build-up” entails.
“You will not be expected to teach or supervise students,” the letter informs Professor Krugman, who replies: “I admit that I had to read it several times to be clear ... it’s remarkably generous.”

According to the U.S. Census website, in 2012 there were 103,087,000 full-time, year-round workers; of them, 16,606,000 worked for the government. Of the 86,429,000 Americans who worked full-time, year-round in the private sector, 77,392,000 were employed as wage and salary workers for private-sector. Approximately 52,000 worked full-time, year-round without pay in a family enterprise. 49,901,000 people received Social Security in the fourth quarter of 2011 and 46,440,000 received Medicare. There were also 5,098,000  received unemployment compensation. 3,178,000 veterans received benefits and 34,000 veterans got educational assistance. 108,592,000 people in the fourth quarter of 2011 lived in a household that included people benefiting from "one or more means-tested program."

Around 270 BC, the Greek astronomer Aristarchus measured the duration of lunar eclipses and, using geometry, he devised a simple and impressively accurate way to calculate the Moon's distance, in terms of the radius of planet Earth, from the eclipse duration.
 
 
AAAAAAAAaaaaaaannnnnddddd.....a picture of P.L. Travers:

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